For the maudlin among us, the final Downton Abbey film should perhaps come with a warning. Everything in it is tinged with wistfulness – a goodbye to cherished characters and a farewell to a stately home that was a sturdy presence in a transient world. When the ITV series started in 2010, wasn’t life … better? Did Elizabeth McGovern feel this too, the sense of time passing? After all, her character, Cora, is now ageing out of custodianship of Downton along with her husband, Lord Grantham, in favour of a younger generation and a changing era as the 1930s dawn.
“No!” says McGovern, snapping me out of my melancholy. “I feel very excited that I’m going into a gratifying new phase in my career.” As well as reviving Cora, there is the play she has written, Ava: The Secret Conversations. Starring McGovern as Hollywood actor Ava Gardner, it will run in New York, Chicago and Toronto, having made its debut in London in 2022. There is also a new album of her folk-inspired music. “I feel like I’m just beginning,” she declares as we meet at her publicist’s London office. At first glance, McGovern, fine-boned and composed, seems delicate – but if you only go on first impressions, you’ll miss her rebellious spirit.
Not that making Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale wasn’t emotional. “You don’t have to work very hard, as a film-maker, to touch on that depth, because we’ve been working on it for so many years,” she says. McGovern worried that the absence of Maggie Smith – who died last year after giving the show the brilliantly scathing Dowager Countess – would feel like too big a loss to the Downton world. But she says Smith’s presence “permeates” it. “She’s still very much in the atmosphere. I don’t feel there’s a big hole. In fact, in some ways, it sort of freed up the rest of the narrative to have a flow, because it’s not stopping for her moments. But everything she represents is there. She’s in every room, in every interaction, so it’s not like she’s not there. It’s a weird thing.”
The women of Downton, whether the steely Lady Mary or spirited young cook Daisy, are gratifyingly tough, but Cora, usually quietly supportive in the background, never seemed that robust, even though it was her money – as an American heiress – that was running everything. Was that difficult to play? “At times, yes,” says McGovern. “I think as a contemporary woman, it is hard to feel the straitjacket of that period.” Did she ever fight for Cora to have more agency? “I wish at times she could have had more interesting stories,” says McGovern, but adds that it wouldn’t have been appropriate for her to have had “any more political or social power, because it just wouldn’t be accurate to the time”.
Cora, though, is a vision of an exciting America; the daughter of a Jewish immigrant installed at Downton with her bags of new money and her progressive outlook. Were Downton set now, instead of Cora coming here to shake up Britain’s class-ridden ways, she would be a wealthy liberal refugee, a bit like Ellen DeGeneres, fleeing Trump’s America. McGovern, who grew up in California, has lived in the UK for the past 32 years. She is shocked and disappointed at modern US politics.
“I mean,” she says, “it’s a reality that must have been bubbling away under what I thought was America. It can’t have come from nowhere.” But, describing herself as a positive person, she adds: “I think it will be painful, but we have too much successful history as a free country for us to let it go. It’s all of our responsibility to peacefully make sure we hold on to everything that I was confident – and complacent about – that America represented.”
McGovern had huge success early on. Her debut was in Robert Redford’s 1980 film Ordinary People, and she won an Oscar nomination for her role in her second film, Ragtime. This was followed by a part in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, opposite Robert de Niro. “I think I did feel like, ‘Gosh, this isn’t as hard as people say.’” She smiles. “Until I later experienced how difficult it is. My experience early on was just trying to keep my head on straight, do job after job, and do what most people are doing at that age – try to grow up. I only realised later how difficult it is to sustain a career.”
Hers wasn’t a showbiz family: her parents were teachers. And although she has loved acting since she was a child, it was never about becoming a star. As a young woman in an often dangerous industry, this probably protected her. “I was never desperate, so I could always just walk away. A lot of young women didn’t feel they could. I think I was very lucky.”
It also made her see the downsides of fame. “I think I did manage to avoid it myself, but the price you pay for fame is that it becomes really hard to have any relationships of intimacy, because you are collateral. Your whole being has sort of been sold, and that creates a tension about what people want from you.”
A lot of McGovern’s early roles were as the girlfriend to the male lead. Then, she says: “I went from being the girlfriend to the perfect wife, and that I found frustrating. Most movies, television – it’s always the man’s point of view. It’s such a deep, subliminal thing that audiences are not even aware of it. I wasn’t even particularly aware of it. I knew my job early on was to fulfil a man’s fantasy of the woman they wanted. It never occurred to me to even question it.”
Brad Pitt played McGovern’s boyfriend in the 1994 comedy The Favor. We joke – bitterly – that were she to be in a film with him now, she would probably be cast as his mother. This says a lot about what’s still considered desirable in a woman even though, at 64, McGovern is only three years Pitt’s senior. “I really don’t think that, just because society is viewing something that way, we have to. I try to have this discussion with my daughters. We can have a feeling independent of the consensus in society. I’ve just done my own thing and just kept doing it.”
She bristles, not unreasonably, when I point out that her embracing her silver hair seems rare in her business. Was that a political decision? “Not really. But once again, I feel like a woman my age – that’s what we’re asked to talk about. I regret that about society.”
There is something bracing about the way McGovern carves her own path. She left Hollywood and moved to London to start a family; she has two grownup daughters with her husband, the film-maker and producer Simon Curtis (who directed The Grand Finale). Approaching her 40s, she started a band, Sadie and the Hotheads, and started releasing music. “I have to remind myself,” she says, “that people will either like it or they won’t – and whatever they feel is fine with me. It’s about doing it.”
In her 50s, she wrote her play about Gardner, drawn to the actor’s independent spirit. Now in her 60s, she is writing a screenplay, although she won’t say what it’s about. “It’s my next obsession. I really want to write stuff. I’m really excited about that.” Doing so is partly a way to create interesting work for herself as an older actor. There has certainly been plenty of talk about this – does she think the situation has improved? “Not that I’ve noticed.”
She loved the recent show Dying for Sex, in which Michelle Williams plays a terminally ill woman in her 40s who embarks on a last attempt at sexual exploration. “It’s such a female story. I found that to be really encouraging, but it’s not going to be about someone my age.” Why? Is it because society considers the thought of older women having a sex life shocking? “I think possibly, yes. I mean, what can we do as women, except just keep going and not buy into it? We have no other choice.”
If it takes a bit of effort, the pay-off is surely worth it – if McGovern and her outlook are anything to go by. “It’s a daily exercise in getting your head tuned into the right thing. It’s not that I blame anyone for accepting the status quo, but it doesn’t mean I have to. No way.” She laughs. “No way.”